Writing My Way to Clarity
I was fortunate and grateful to have been recently asked by the Barcelona online art magazine, FrikiFish, to talk about my artwork and art practice. I saw this as an opportunity to communicate something about my work to others, but what I didn’t realize was the extent to which the interview would benefit my own understanding of my work.
I do a fair amount of free-writing and journaling. While I don’t do daily morning pages like many writers and artists, I do set aside regular time for stream-of-conscious writing. Sometimes this writing is just a dump of whatever is on my mind, but more often than not it’s about a specific problem, topic, or question. Like many of you probably do, I find this kind of writing hugely valuable for clearing my mind, generating ideas, and getting some clarity.
But the thing about free-writing is that it often doesn’t make perfect sense (or even any sense!). In fact, adding the requirement of making sense would stop the flow of thought dead in its tracks. I would never share my journals with others – by design, they are full of half-baked ideas, non-sequiturs, and rambling musings. True, there are also gems in there, but they are definitely in the rough.
Writing things that other people will read – like a response to an interview question or an artist statement – is a whole different ballgame. This is writing for communicating and teaching, and it demands coherence and understandability. Getting our thoughts ready to share with others makes us reflect deeply – to not only unearth our ideas and opinions but to cultivate and prune them. The questions posed by FrikiFish really made me think about my art practice and the meaning behind my artwork. As a result, I solidified my own understanding and discovered the words with which to share that understanding with others.
Thankfully, I don’t have to wait for another interview (I wish!) to harness the power of being forced to communicate in a way that others can understand. I’ve just been reading about a teaching method called – I’m not kidding – “plastic platypus learning” or the “platypus learning technique.” It’s much how it sounds: students “teach” an inanimate object like a plastic platypus and in doing so, studies have found that the students improve their own understanding and knowledge retention. According to my techie husband, software engineers do something similar. They call it “rubber duck debugging” and it involves explaining their code to a rubber duck as a way of discovering bugs.
What platypuses, rubber ducks, and journalists have in common is that they force you to look at what you do and why you do it from an outside perspective. Much of our thought is quick and operates below the surface. This can leave us feeling confident in our understanding – a confidence that sometimes masks knowledge gaps and that doesn’t necessarily translate to being able to articulate what we know. Being forced to communicate our ideas requires us to slow our brains down and bring our thoughts to the surface where we can inspect them, try out different ways of putting them together, discover what’s missing, and shape a compelling narrative. In doing so, not only are we better able to communicate our ideas, but we sometimes form connections and develop insights that we might not have otherwise seen.
The other thing that written or verbal communication does is force us to think about how someone without our intimate understanding of our work will hear what we’re saying. So that if I tell my rubber duck, “My work examines the hyper-contextualization of the hierarchy of cultural norms within the spatial derivative of transformed experience,” his blank stare will hopefully alert me to the fact that not only does he have no idea what I’m talking about, but he’s wondering if maybe I’m hiding behind weird words because I don’t really know how to clearly explain what I’m doing.
I like the idea of talking to inanimate objects – and if the science says it’s effective, I figure it makes me wise instead of crazy. I don’t have a plastic platypus, but my son does have a little Beethoven rubber duck that I might borrow the next time I need to try and capture my thinking in my studio notes, revamp my artist statement, or head to a gathering where someone might ask that question that often leaves me like a deer in the headlights: “Oh, you’re an artist … What’s your art about?”
What are your favorite ways of bringing coherence to your thoughts?
